How it was that Leucippus, from these poor principles of atoms and of the vacuum, which he never got beyond, because he took them to be the absolute, hazarded a construction of the whole world (which may appear to us as strange as it is empty), Diogenes Laertius tells us (IX. 31-33) in an account which seems meaningless enough. But the nature of the subject allows of little better, and we can do no more than observe from it the barrenness of this conception. It runs thus: “Atoms, divergent in form, propel themselves through their separation from the infinite, into the great vacuum.” (Democritus adds to this, “by means of their mutual resistance (_ἀντιτυπία_) and a tremulous, swinging motion (_παλμός_).”)[71] “Here gathered, they form one vortex (_δίνην_) where, by dashing together and revolving round in all sorts of ways, the like are separated off with the like. But since they are of equal weight, when they cannot, on account of their number, move in any way, the finer go into outer vacuum, being so to speak forced out; and the others remain together and, being entangled, run one against another, and form the first round system. But this stands apart like a husk that holds within it all sorts of bodies; since these, in pressing towards the middle, make a vortex movement, this encircling skin becomes thin, because from the action of the vortex, they are continually running together. The earth arises in this way, because these bodies, collected in the middle, remain together. That which encircles and which is like a husk, again becomes increased by means of the adherence of external bodies, and since it also moves within the vortex, it draws everything with which it comes in contact to itself.
The union of some of these bodies again forms a system, first the moist and slimy, and then the dry, and that which circles in the vortex of the whole; after that, being ignited, they constitute the substance of the stars. The outer circle is the sun, the inner the moon,” &c. This is an empty representation; there is no interest in these dry, confused ideas of circle-motion, and of what is later on called attraction and repulsion, beyond the fact that the different kinds of motion are looked at as the principle of matter.
_c. The Soul_ Finally Aristotle relates (De anim. I. 2) that in regard to the soul, Leucippus and Democritus said that “it is spherical atoms.” We find further from Plutarch (De plac. phil. IV. 8) that Democritus applied himself to the relation borne by consciousness to the explanation, amongst other things, of the origin of feelings, because with him, the conceptions that from things fine surfaces, so to speak, free themselves, and fly into the eyes, ears, &c., first began. We see that, thus far, Democritus expressed the difference between the moments of implicit Being and Being-for-another more distinctly. For he said, as Sextus tells us (adv. Math. VII. 135): “Warmth exists according to opinion (_νόμῳ_), and so do cold and colour, sweet and bitter: only the indivisible and void are truthful (_ἐτεῇ_).” That is to say, only the void and indivisible and their determinations are implicit; unessential, different Being, such as warmth, &c., is for another. But by this the way is at once opened up to the false idealism that means to be done with what is objective by bringing it into relation with consciousness, merely saying of it that it is _my_ feeling. Thereby sensuous individuality is, indeed, annulled in the form of Being, but it still remains the same sensuous manifold; a sensuously notionless manifold of feeling is established, in which there is no reason, and with which this idealism has no further concern.
2. EMPEDOCLES.
2. EMPEDOCLES.
The fragments of Empedocles left, have several times been collected. Sturz of Leipzig collected above 400 verses.[72] Peyron arranged a collection of fragments of Empedocles and Parmenides,[73] which was put into print in Leipzig in 1810. In Wolff’s Analects, a treatise is to be found on Empedocles by Ritter.
Empedocles’ birthplace was Agrigentum in Sicily, while Heraclitus belonged to Asia Minor. We thus come back to Italy, for our history changes about between these two sides; from Greece proper, as the middle point, we have as yet had no philosophies at all. Empedocles, according to Tennemann (Vol. I. p. 415), flourished about the 80th Olympiad (460 B.C.). Sturz (pp. 9, 10) quotes Dodwell’s words: (De ætate Pythag. p. 220), which indicate that Empedocles was born in Olympiad 77, 1 (472 B.C.). They are as follows: “In the second year of the 85th Olympiad Parmenides had reached his 65th year, so that Zeno was born in the second year of the 75th Olympiad;[74] thus he was six years older than his fellow-student Empedocles, for the latter was only one year old when Pythagoras died in the first or second year of the 77th Olympiad.” Aristotle says (Met. I. 3): “In age Empedocles is subsequent to Anaxagoras, but his works are earlier.” But not only did he philosophize earlier as regards time, that is, at a younger age, but in reference to the stage reached by the Notion, his philosophy is earlier and less mature than that of Anaxagoras.
From Diogenes’ accounts of his life (VIII. 59, 60-73), he also seems to have been a kind of magician and sorcerer, like Pythagoras. During his life he was much respected by his fellow-citizens, and, after his death, a statue was erected to him in his native town; his fame extended very far. He did not live apart, like Heraclitus, but in the exercise of great influence on the affairs of the town of Agrigentum, like Parmenides in Elea. He acquired the credit, after the death of Meton, the ruler of Agrigentum, of bringing about a free constitution and equal rights to all citizens. He likewise frustrated several attempts which were made by people of Agrigentum to seize upon the rulership of their city; and when the esteem of his fellow-citizens rose so high that they offered him the crown, he rejected their offers, and lived ever after amongst them as a respected private individual.
Both of his life and death much which was fabulous was told. Seeing that he was famous in life, we are told that he wished not to appear to die an ordinary death, as a proof that he was not a mortal man, but had merely passed out of sight. After a feast he is said either to have suddenly disappeared, or else to have been on Etna with his friends, and suddenly to have been seen of them no more. But what became of him was revealed by the fact that one of his shoes was thrown up by Etna, and found by one of his friends; this made it clear that he threw himself into Etna, thereby to withdraw himself from the notice of mankind, and to give rise to the idea that he did not really die, but that he was taken up amongst the gods.
The origin and occasion for this fable seems to lie in a poem in which there are several verses that, taken alone, make great professions. He says, according to Sturz, (p. 530: Reliquiæ _τῶν καθαρμῶν_, v. 364-376):— “Friends who dwell within the fort on yellow Acragas And who in the best of works are busy, I greet you! To you I am an immortal god, no more a mortal man, Do ye not see how that where’er I go, all honour me, My head being ‘circled round with diadems and crowns of green? When so decked out, I show myself in towns of wealth, Men and women pray to me. And thousands follow My steps, to seek from me the way to bliss, Others ask for prophecies; others again, Healing words for ailments manifold beseech. But what is this to me—as though ‘twere anything By art to conquer much corrupted man.”
But, taken in the context, this laudation means that I am highly honoured, but what is the value of that to me; it expresses weariness of the honour given him by men.
Empedocles had Pythagoreans as pupils, and went about with them; he is sometimes considered to have been a Pythagorean like Parmenides and Zeno, but this is the only ground for such a statement. It is a question whether he belonged to the League; his philosophy has no resemblance to the Pythagorean. According to Diogenes Laertius (VIII. 56), he was also called Zeno’s fellow-pupil. There have, indeed, been many isolated reflections of a physical kind preserved to us, as also some words of exhortation, and in him thought as penetrating within reality, and the knowledge of nature seem to have attained to greater breadth and compass; we find in him, however, less speculative depth than in Heraclitus, but a Notion more imbued with the point of view of reality, and a culture derived from natural philosophy or the contemplation of nature. Empedocles is more poetic than definitely philosophical; he is not very interesting, and much cannot be made of his philosophy.
As to the particular Notion which governs it, and which really begins in it to appear, we may call it Combination or Synthesis. It is as combination that the unity of opposites first presents itself; this Notion, first opening up with Heraclitus, is, while in a condition of rest, conceived of as combination, before thought grasps the universal in Anaxagoras. Empedocles’ synthesis, as a completion of the relationship, thus belongs to Heraclitus, whose speculative Idea, though in reality, is process, but this is so without the individual moments in reality being mutually related as Notions. Empedocles’ conception of synthesis holds good to the present day. He also is the originator of the common idea that has even come down to us, of regarding the four known physical elements of fire, air, water, and earth, as fundamental; by chemists they are certainly no longer held to be elements, because they understand by elements a simple chemical substance. I will now give Empedocles’ ideas shortly, and draw the many units mentioned into the connection of a whole.
His general ideas Aristotle[75] shortly sums up thus: “To the three elements, fire, air, and water, each of which was in turn considered as the principle from which everything proceeded, Empedocles added the Earth as the fourth corporeal element, saying that it is these which always remain the same, never becoming, but being united and separated as the more or the less, combining into one and coming out of one.” Carbon, metal, &c., are not something existing in and for itself which remains constant and never becomes; thus nothing metaphysical is signified by them. But with Empedocles this undoubtedly is the case: every particular thing arises through some kind of union of the four. These four elements, to our ordinary idea, are not so many sensuous things if we consider them as universal elements; for, looked at sensuously, there are various other sensuous things. All that is organic, for example, is of another kind; and, further, earth as one, as simple, pure earth, does not exist, for it is in manifold determinateness. In the idea of four elements we have the elevation of sensuous ideas into thought.
Aristotle further says in reference to the abstract Notion of their relation to one another (Met. I. 4), that Empedocles did not only require the four elements as principles, but also Friendship and Strife, which we have already met with in Heraclitus; it is at once evident that these are of another kind, because they are, properly speaking, universal. He has the four natural elements as the real, and friendship and strife as the ideal principles, so that six elements, of which Sextus[76] often speaks, make their appearance in lines that Aristotle (Met. II. 4) and Sextus (adv. Math. VII. 92) have preserved:— “With the earth, we see the earth, with water, water, With air, heavenly air, with fire, eternal fire, With love, love is seen, and strife with sorrowful strife.”
Through our participation in them they become for us. There we have the idea that spirit, the soul, is itself the unity, the very totality of elements, in which the principle of earth relates to earth, water to water, love to love, &c.[77] In seeing fire, the fire is in us for whom objective fire is, and so on.
Empedocles also speaks of the process of these elements, but he did not comprehend it further; the point to be remarked is that he represented their unity as a combination. In this synthetic union, which is a superficial relation devoid of Notion, being partly related and partly unrelated, the contradiction necessarily results that at one time the unity of elements is established and at another, their separation: the unity is not the universal unity in which they are moments, being even in their diversity one, and in their unity different, for these two moments, unity and diversity, fall asunder, and union and separation are quite indeterminate relationships. Empedocles says in the first book of his poem on Nature, as given by Sturz (p. 517, v. 106-109): “There is no such thing as a Nature, only a combination and separation of what is combined; it is merely called Nature by men.”
That is to say, that which constitutes anything, as being its elements or parts, is not as yet called its nature, but only its determinate unity. For example, the nature of an animal is its constant and real determinateness, its kind, its universality, which is simple. But Empedocles does away with nature in this sense, for every thing, according to him, is the combination of simple elements, and thus not in itself the universal, simple and true: this is not what is signified by us when we speak of nature. Now this nature in which a thing moves in accordance with its own end, Aristotle (De gen. et corr. II. 6) misses in Empedocles; in later times this conception was still further lost. Because the elements were thus existent simply in themselves, there was, properly speaking, no process established in them, for in process they are only vanishing moments, and not existent in themselves. Being thus implicit, they must have been unchangeable, or they could not constitute themselves into a unity; for in the one their subsistence, or their implicit existence would be destroyed. But because Empedocles says that things subsist from these elements, he immediately establishes their unity.
These are the principal points in Empedocles’ philosophy. I will quote the remarks that Aristotle (Met. I. 4) makes in this regard.
(_α_) “If we wish to follow this up, and do so in accordance with the understanding, not merely stumbling over it like Empedocles, we should say that friendship is the principle of good and strife the principle of evil, so that in a measure we may assert that Empedocles maintained—and was the first to do so—that the evil and the good are the absolute principles, because the good is the principle of all good, and the bad the principle of all evil.” Aristotle shows the trace of universality present here; for to him it may be termed essential in dealing with the Notion of the principle, that which is in and for itself. But this is only the Notion, or the thought which is present in and for itself; we have not yet seen such a principle, for we find it first in Anaxagoras. If Aristotle found the principle of motion missed in ancient philosophers, in the Becoming of Heraclitus, he again missed in Heraclitus the still deeper principle of the Good, and hence wished to discover it in Empedocles. By the good the “why” is to be understood, that which is an end in and for itself, which is clearly established in itself, which is on its own account, and through which all else is; the end has the determination of activity, the bringing forth of itself, so that it, as end to itself, is the Idea, the Notion that makes itself objective and, in its objectivity, is identical with itself. Aristotle thus entirely controverts Heraclitus, because his principle is change alone, without remaining like self, maintaining self, and going back within self.
(_β_) Aristotle also says in criticizing further the relationship and determination of these two universal principles of Friendship and Strife, as of union and separation, that “Empedocles neither adequately made use of them nor discovered in them what they involved (_ἐξευρίσκει τὸ ὁμολογούμενον_); for with him friendship frequently divides and strife unites. That is, when the All falls asunder through strife amongst the elements, fire is thereby united into one, and so is each of the other elements.” The separation of the elements which are comprised within the All, is just as necessarily the union amongst themselves of the parts of each element; that which, on the one hand, is the coming into separation, as independent, is at the same time something united within itself. “But when everything through friendship goes back into one, it is necessary that the parts of each element undergo separation again.” The being in one is itself a manifold, a diverse relation of the four diversities, and thus the going together is likewise a separation. This is the case generally with all determinateness, that it must in itself be the opposite, and must manifest itself as such. The remark that, speaking generally, there is no union without separation, no separation without union, is a profound one; identity and non-identity are thought-determinations of this kind which cannot be separated. The reproach made by Aristotle is one that lies in the nature of the thing. And when Aristotle says that Empedocles, although younger than Heraclitus, “was the first to maintain such principles, because he did not assert that the principle of motion is one, but that it is different and opposed,” this certainly relates to the fact that he thought it was in Empedocles that he first found design, although his utterances on the subject were dubious.
(_γ_) As to the real moments in which this ideal realizes itself, Aristotle further says, “He does not speak of them as four”—equivalents in juxtaposition—“but on the contrary as two; fire he puts by itself on the one side, and the three others, earth, air, and water, on the other.” What would be most interesting is the determination of their relationship.
(_δ_) In what deals with the relationship of the two ideal moments, friendship and strife, and of the four real elements, there is thus nothing rational, for Empedocles, according to Aristotle (Met. XII. 10), did not properly separate, but co-ordinated them, so that we often see them in proximity and counted as having equal value; but it is self-evident that Empedocles also separated these two sides, the real and the ideal, and expressed thought as their relation.
(_ε_) Aristotle says with justice (De gen. et corr. I. 1) that “Empedocles contradicts both himself and appearances. For at one time he maintains that none of the elements springs out of the other, but all else comes from them; and, at another time, he makes them into a whole through friendship, and again destroys this unity through strife. Thus through particular differences and qualities, one becomes water, the other fire, &c. Now if the particular differences are taken away (and they can be taken away since they have arisen), it is evident that water arises from earth, and the reverse. The All was not yet fire, earth, water, and air, when these were still one, so that it is not clear whether he made the one or the many to be, properly speaking, real existence.” Because the elements become one, their special character, that through which water is water, is nothing in itself, that is, they are passing into something different; but this contradicts the statement that they are the absolute elements, or that they are implicit. He considers actual things as an intermingling of elements, but in regard to their first origin, he thinks that everything springs from one through friendship and strife. This customary absence of thought is in the nature of synthetic conceptions; it now upholds unity, then multiplicity, and does not bring both thoughts together; as sublated, one is also not one.[78] F. ANAXAGORAS.
F. ANAXAGORAS.
With Anaxagoras[79] a light, if still a weak one, begins to dawn, because the understanding is now recognized as the principle. Aristotle says of Anaxagoras (Met. I. 3): “But he who said that reason (_νοῦς_), in what lives as also in nature, is the origin of the world and of all order, is like a sober man as compared with those who came before and spoke at random (_εἰκῆ_).” As Aristotle says, hitherto philosophers may “be compared to the fencers who fence in an unscientific way. Just as the latter often make good thrusts in their struggle, though not by any skill, these philosophers seem to speak without any knowledge of what they say.” Now if Anaxagoras, as a sober man amongst drunkards, was the first to reach this consciousness—for he says that pure thought is the actually existent universal and true—he yet, to a considerable extent, still thrusts into space.
The connection of his philosophy with what precedes is as follows: In Heraclitus’ Idea as motion, all moments are absolutely vanishing. Empedocles represents the gathering together of this motion into a unity, but into a synthetic unity; and with Leucippus and Democritus it is the same. With Empedocles, however, the moments of this unity are the existent elements of fire, water, &c., and with the others, pure abstractions, implicit being, thoughts. But in this way universality is directly asserted, for the opposing elements have no longer any sensuous support. We have had Being, Becoming, the One, as principles; they are universal thoughts and not sensuous, nor are they figures of the imagination; the content and its parts are, however, taken from what is sensuous, and they are thoughts in some sort of a determination. Anaxagoras now says that it is not gods, sensuous principles, elements, or thoughts—which really are determinations of reflection—but that it is the Universal, Thought itself, in and for itself, without opposition, all embracing, which is the substance or the principle. The unity as universal, returns from the opposition into itself, while in the synthesis of Empedocles, what is opposed is still apart from it and independent, and Thought is not Being. Here, however, Thought as pure, free process in itself, is the self-determining universal, and is not distinguished from conscious thought. In Anaxagoras quite new ground is thus opened up.
Anaxagoras concludes this period, and after him a fresh one begins. In accordance with the favourite idea of there being a genealogical descent of principles from the teacher to the taught, because he was an Ionian, he is often represented as perpetuating the Ionic school, and as an Ionic philosopher: Hermotimus of Clazomenæ, too, was his teacher. To support this theory Diogenes Laertius (II. 6) makes him a disciple of Anaximenes, whose birth is, however, placed in Ol. 55-58, or about sixty years earlier than that of Anaxagoras.
Aristotle says (Met. I. 3) that Anaxagoras first began by these determinations to express absolute reality as understanding. Aristotle and others after him, such as Sextus (adv. Math. IX. 7), mention the bare fact that Hermotimus gave rise to this conception, but it was clearly due to Anaxagoras. Little is gained if such a fact were true, since we learn no more about the philosophy of Hermotimus; it cannot have been much. Others have made numerous historical researches respecting this Hermotimus. The name we have already mentioned amongst those of whom it is said that Pythagoras existed in them before he lived as Pythagoras. We also have a story of Hermotimus to the effect that he possessed the peculiar gift of being able to make his soul quit his body. But this did him bad service in the end, since his wife, with whom he had a dispute, and who besides knew very well how matters stood, showed to their acquaintances this soul-deserted body as dead, and it was burnt before the soul reinstated itself—which soul must have been astonished.[80] It is not worth while to investigate what lies at the ground of these ancient stories, i.e. into how we should regard the matter: we may think of it as implying a state of ecstasy.
We must consider the life of Anaxagoras before his philosophy. Anaxagoras, according to Diogenes (II. 7), born in Ol. 70 (500 B.C.), comes earlier than Democritus, and in age also precedes Empedocles, yet, on the whole, he was contemporaneous with these, as also with Parmenides; he was as old as Zeno, and lived somewhat earlier than Socrates, but still they were acquainted with one another. His native town was Clazomenæ, in Lydia, not very far from Colophon and Ephesus, and situated on an isthmus by which a great peninsula is connected with the mainland. His life is shortly summed up in the statement that he devoted himself to the study of the sciences, withdrew from public affairs; according to Valerius Maximus (VIII. 7, extr. 6) he made numerous journeys, and finally, according to Tennemann (Vol. I. pp. 300, 415), in the forty-fifth year of his age, in the 81st Olympiad (456 B.C.), and at a propitious time, he came to Athens.
With him we thus find Philosophy in Greece proper, where so far there had been none, and coming, indeed, as far as Athens; hitherto either Asia Minor or Italy had been the seat of Philosophy, though, when the inhabitants of Asia Minor fell under Persian rule, with their loss of freedom, it expired amongst them. Anaxagoras, himself a native of Asia Minor, lived in the important period between the war of the Medes and the age of Pericles, principally in Athens, which had now reached the zenith of its greatness, for it was both the head of Grecian power, and the seat and centre of the arts and sciences. Athens, after the Persian wars, brought the greater part of the Greek islands into subjection, as also a number of maritime towns in Thrace, and even further into the Black Sea. As the greatest artists collected in Athens, so also did the most noted philosophers and sophists live there—a circle of luminaries in the arts and sciences such as we have in Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Diogenes of Apollonia, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and others from Asia Minor. Pericles then ruled the State, and raised it to that height of splendour which may be called the golden age in Athenian life; Anaxagoras, although living in the most flourishing time of Athenian life, touches on its decay, or rather reaches the first threatening of that decay, which ended in a total extermination of this beautiful life.
What is of special interest at this time is the opposition between Athens and Lacedæmon, the two Greek nations which contended with one another for the foremost place in Greece; here we must therefore allude to the principles of these celebrated States. While the Lacedæmonians had no arts or sciences, Athens had to thank the character of its constitution, and of its whole spirit, for the fact that it was the seat of the sciences and fine arts. But the constitution of Lacedæmon is also worthy of high esteem, for it regulated and restrained the high Doric spirit, and its principal feature was that all personal peculiarity was subordinated, or rather sacrificed, to the general aim of the life of the State, and the individual had the consciousness of his honour and sufficiency only in the consciousness of working for the State. A people of such genuine unity, in whom the will of the individual had, properly speaking, quite disappeared, were united by an indestructible bond, and Lacedæmon was hence placed at the head of Greece, and obtained the leadership, which, we find, it held among the Argives in the days of Troy. This is a great principle which must exist in every true State, but which with the Lacedæmonians retained its one-sided character; this one-sidedness was avoided by the Athenians, and by that means they became the greater. In Lacedæmon personality proper was so much disregarded that the individual could not have free development or expression; individuality was not recognized, and hence not brought into harmony with the common end of the State. This abrogation of the rights of subjectivity, which, expressed in his own way, is also found in Plato’s Republic, was carried very far with the Lacedæmonians. But the universal is living spirit only in so far as the individual consciousness finds itself as such within it; the universal is not constituted of the immediate life and being of the individual, the mere substance, but formed of conscious life. As individuality which separates itself from the universal is powerless and falls to the ground, the one-sided universal, the morality of individuality cannot stand firm. The Lacedæmonian spirit, which had not taken into account the freedom of consciousness, and whose universal had isolated itself therefrom, had hence to see it break forth in opposition to the universal; and though the first to come forward as the liberators of Greece from its tyranny were the Spartans, whom even Athens thanks for the expulsion of the descendants of Pisistratus, their relationship to their confederates soon passes into that of common, mean, tyranny.
Within the State it likewise ends in a harsh aristocracy, just as the fixed equilibrium of property (each family retaining its inheritance, and through forbidding the possession of money, or trade and commerce, preventing the possibility of inequality in riches) passes into an avarice which, as opposed to this universal, is brutal and mean. This essential moment of particularity, not being taken into the State, and hence not made legal and moral (moral first of all), comes forth as vice. In a rational organization all the elements of the Idea are present; if the liver were isolated as bile it would become not more, and not less active, but becoming antagonistic, it would isolate itself from the corporate economy of the body. Solon, on the contrary, gave to the Athenians not only equality of laws and unity of spirit in their constitution (which was a purer democracy than in Sparta), but although each citizen had his substantial consciousness in unity with the laws of the State, he also gave free play to the individual mind, so that each might do as he would, and might find expression for himself. Solon entrusted the executive to the people, not to the Ephors, and this became self-government after the displacement of the tyrants, and thus in truth a free people arose; the individual had the whole within himself, as he had his consciousness and action in the whole.